The Queen of Spiders
by Theta74
Summary: When Firenze fails to save the life of the Girl Who Lived, a rogue Acromantula steps up to the task. But what will result from the lengths that must be gone too to remedy the centaur's failure?


**The updates for this might be few and far between; i'm working on a big upcoming release and want most if not all of it finished before i start releasing chapter.**

The Queen of Spiders

Chapter 1:

In the middle of a forest, in the wilds of Scotland, the young Ariana Potter writhed in pain. A hooded figure was approaching, silvery blood dribbling down its chin. Draco Malfoy had fled as soon as the figure looked up from the dying unicorn, and at the two first years. Ariana, however, had been overcome with a terrible pain, coming from her scar. Beneath the agony, she noticed something leap over her; she recognised the muscular form from earlier that night. A centaur.  
"Leave this Forrest at onc-" the centaur's smooth tenor was cut off as the cloaked figure raised a wand, snapping off a green spell that caused the centaur to crumple to the ground.  
Then the figure turned their wand on her.  
A shadowy form appeared behind the figure, and long hairy arms circled the cloaked waist. The figure struggled, but the shadow was too strong, and it threw the stranger up, over its back and through the roof of the trees. It dropped to the forest floor a clearing over, hesitated, and swept into the surrounding gloom.  
Ariana turned her attention to the shadow, and realised that the two hairy arms were not arms at all, but pincers; pincers belonging to a spider, an extremely large spider. Just as Ariana thought her day couldn't get any weirder, with unicorns and centaurs and mysterious cloaked figures, it spoke.  
"The equinus was brave but foolish," the pincers clicked. "Are you hurt?"  
"N- No. W- Who are you?" Ariana stuttered. The spider stepped forwards, then leapt to the side as a red bolt of light flew towards it. The cloaked figure had circled back around and was advancing over the hill of roots that Draco had fled across. The figure turned their wand on her and a brown bolt shot from the tip, she tried to dodge and tripped over another root. The second spell hit her in the leg and sent horrible pains radiating up her thigh. She looked down, eyes tearing up, to see the muscles straining, which felt extremely painful.  
The spider had been dodging the figure's other bolts, but was moving away from the clearing, drawing the cloak away from the immobile girl. Just as the arachnid was about to vanish from sight, it turned and scuttled across the floor, picking Ariana up with its front pair of legs before hastening away from the figure.

The spider scuttled like that for what seemed like hours, but it couldn't have been more than 10 minutes. Eventually, they reached a large, fallen tree. The spider moved to its upturned base and Ariana saw the large web that had been built into the hollow. The spider lowered the girl to the wood in a rough seating position and moved to face her, lowering itself on the other side of the hollow log. Ariana's leg was still cramped.  
"Look, I don't mean to sound ungrateful for the rescue," she said. "But this still hurts, a lot."  
"I'm sorry," the spider clicked, "I can't much to fix that to fix that until daybreak, when I might be able to risk taking you to Avô."  
"Oh, okay," Ariana said, and adjusted her seating, which seemed to make her leg hurt less, "if you don't mind me asking, what-who are you?"  
"I am Thawr," the spider said, "and I am an Acromantula. So, what are you doing in this forest?"  
"Detention," Ariana replied. "And trying to find the hurt unicorns."

"You are first year student, correct?" Thawr clicked, and moved towards the girl, poising its fangs to pierce Ariana's leg, the one that wasn't gripped by cursed spasms, that is. "Tell the truth."  
"T-that is the truth!" She said, and shuffled, partly to try to evade Thawr's fangs, and to re-adjust her weigh so that it wasn't all pressed onto her now spasming buttock.  
"The headmaster is foolish to do so for simple disciplinary actions." Thawr said, moving away. Ariana twitched; the painful cramping of her muscles had spread to her side now.  
"I- I think it's getting worse." She said, her breathing speeding up. "Is there anything you can do?"  
"I can't take you up to the school, that fiend that attacked you is still searching the forest." Thawr said, then answered Ariana's unasked question. "I have webs and tripwires spun all around the forest, the thrumming is faint, but it is sure." And the Thawr seemed to gesture to one of the webs dotting the clearing, a specific spot on the web was vibrating, and attached to it was web strands that lead off into the forest.  
"So we can't leave?" Ariana said. "Are you sure there's nothing you can do? I don't know what this spell will do to me."  
"There is… something I can do," Thawr looked away from Ariana, "but I'm not sure if it will save you, and it comes with a price…" at that point, Ariana's chest, all around her rib cage cramped, and she stopped breathing.  
"D- d- do it!" She gasped. Thawr inched closer, made a chewing motion with its mouth and mandibles and then bit Ariana in the thigh. The last thing she could remember, before she blacked out was the sensation of her ribs squeezing like a vice, and a burning sensation spreading through her thigh where Thawr's fangs had sunk deep into her flesh.

The first thing that Ariana noticed when she awoke was the white sheet lain over her head, the second was the sound of several voices.  
The one she identified first was that of the racking sobs of Hagrid. The second was the headmaster, Albus Dumbledore and the third she didn't recognise.  
"I am very sorry, Hagrid," said the unknown voice, "the last time we were able to smooth it out because you meant no malice. but this time it's gone too far, into sheer negligence. We have no other choice but to take you and the beast to trial."  
"I assure you Cornelius, this was an extremely improbable occurrence, and nothing that Hagrid could have done might have prevented it." Dumbledore said. A pressure rose in Ariana's throat, she flung the sheet off her and pulled herself over to the side of the bed, expelling water, bile and heaving coughs onto the floor.  
"MISS POTTER!" The man named Cornelius yelped. "You're alive!"  
"Ark'!" Hagrid yelped and crouched down next to her bed.  
"It appears that there is no harm done, minister" said Dumbledore, as he waved his wand to vanish the mess on the floor. Then spoke more directly to the man named Cornelius. "You'd best return to the ministry with this good news."  
"Y-yes, I should go." But anything else that the minister had said was drowned out by Hagrid's renewed sobs.  
"Yer could've died!" The giant man said into his gloved hands. "I dunno why I even went along with it!"  
"It's all right Hagrid, it wasn't your fault." Ariana said, patting the man in what she felt was a comforting way. "You couldn't have known things like that dangerous were in the forbidden forest." This, however, set Hagrid's tears off harder than before. Ariana said nothing, and when Hagrid's sobs subsided somewhat Professor Dumbledore spoke.  
"What attacked you was an acromantula, Ariana." The wizened Wizard said. "Charges are not being pressed upon you by the forest's Herd of Centaurs; as they are reasonable enough to realise that the spider was forcing you to attack Firenze."  
Ariana was stunned, that wasn't what had happened at all.  
"You've got it all wrong professors, there was this cloaked thing, drinking from the unicorn, and Firenze was trying to save me, when he was killed, Thawr rescued me!"  
"My girl, Ariana, we all understand that you were under duress and cannot be held accountable for your actions. And a Dementor could never have gotten onto the grounds. Nevertheless, Hagrid and I have decided that it is best to euthanize the beast."  
"But Thawr didn't do anything! That Spider saved my life." She said, her voice edging into a yell.  
Dumbledore raised a hand.  
"If it will appease you then we will hold the execution until you have regained your full faculties." He said, the twinkling in his eyes extinguishing briefly.

"And so then everything went black and I woke up in the hospital wing." Ariana said that night to Ron and Hermione. "I'm not sure what happened when I was out, but Hagrid says that Thawr carried me to his hut this morning. So what happened after Malfoy reached you?"  
"He ran right past us back up to the school." Hermione said.  
"He'd wet himself!" Ron whispered.  
"I told you that I thought he had," Hermione said. "Hagrid brought us back to the edge of the forest and made us run up to the school, and then he went back in to look for you. But he had to stop when the centaurs drove him out for a funeral."  
"Yeah, a centaur tried to fight off that thing in the forest, he was brave, Thawr said." She decided to leave out the 'but foolish' that the acromantula had added.  
"Can you stop talking about that thing?" Ron said. The two girls stared at him. "It's just… I don't like spiders."  
"So what do you think that thing that attacked you was?" Hermione asked Ariana.  
"Well, when I explained it to Dumbledore, he said that there was no way that a 'dementor' could have gotten in the grounds." She said. If Ron had been pale when they were discussing the Acromantula, it was nothing compared to what he looked like now. "What?"  
"They're the guards of Azkaban." He squeaked, and when they looked at him with puzzled expressions he continued. "Azkaban's the prison where they sent You-Know-Who's followers after he vanished. They're supposed to make you feel all cold and horrible. Dad went there once and had still hadn't recovered by the morning."  
"Well I didn't feel especially bad, what do dementors look like?" Ariana said.  
"Big, floating, with these ripped shawl things covering them."  
"Well the thing I saw must not have been a dementor, it was sort of slithering, and had a cloak that looked near good as new." Ariana said. "But Dumbledore wouldn't believe me, because he seemed convinced that I was the one who killed the centaur because," she glanced at Ron and adjusted her words before she said them. "Because I was under pressure."  
"So what was it doing when you found it?" Hermione asked. "That might help us to identify what it was."  
"It was…"Ariana said, and shivered. "Drinking the unicorn's Blood."  
"I'll be right back." Hermione said and raced upstairs to the dormitories; she returned a moment later with a thin textbook that both Ariana and Ron recognised as 'Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them' by Newt Scamander, a copy of which they both had in their own trunks. She flipped open to the entry on Unicorns. "The horn blood and hair all have magical properties." She read aloud, she paused, turned the page, turned it back, tried to pry apart the page to see if it wasn't two stuck together, and held it up to the light. "There's nothing here!" She almost shouted, and before the other two could respond, she raced back upstairs and returned with another book. This one, but hat Ariana and Ron did not own, called 'Native Magical Species of the British Isles' by Mortimer Marshtamp. It was much thicker than Fantastic Beasts. Hermione flicked once again to the entry on Unicorns and read. "Unicorn horns… Unicorn bile… Unicorn Blood is a potent suppressant of magical immunity, and allows the drinker to physically fuse with another magic user, which can help to prolong life in a weakened person without destroying the weakened person. The consumption of unicorn blood and its use in non-ministry of Magic authorised potions is strictly illegal as it requires the slaughter of a Unicorn and the host must continue to consume the blood, requiring more unicorns, and will eventually die themselves." She let the statement hang in the air for a few seconds.  
"What?" Ariana said flatly, and then her mind started to tick over.  
"I know. It's not exactly the nicest thing I've ever read." Hermione said.  
"But who would even want that sort of thing though?" Ron said. "If your head's going to be poking out of someone's chest for the rest of eternity, then death'd be better, wouldn't it? And after the first person died you'd have to get another one."  
"Who do we know who may be mostly dead and extremely weak with a bunch of followers that'd give their lives for him?" Ariana said.  
"You mean You-know-who is out in the forest, having Snape drink unicorn blood for him?" Hermione said, "But he could have killed you at any stage this year, why didn't he just seek you out?"  
Ron started and grilled his armrests.  
"What if he isn't here for Ari'?" He said, "What if…" he paused for dramatic effect, the two girls leaned in closer. "He's here for… the philosopher's stone?"  
A curtain of doom fell upon them.  
"If he got the stone he could make the elixir of life, which theoretically could restore him to an immortal body." Hermione said. The three stared at each other, and gulped.


End file.
